Crows and Angels
by Anya Maygo
Summary: A girl in trouble suddenly finds herself falling - literally! - into another world with some new features she doesn't know how to use or how she obtained. How in the world will she straighten herself out again?
1. Chapter 1

Chapter 1

 **A/N: This story takes place technically somewhere before the final three episodes. ZONE has been defeated, but the gang hasn't split up yet.**

* * *

Angelique left her classes feeling pretty good about herself. Her teacher had told her that her shields were the best of any Chaotian in the village, and that her kinesis was doing decent. She also had plenty of basics to deploy if she ever went to Earth, not that she had any plans to do so. The one thing she hadn't done yet was summoned her spirit monster; her teacher hadn't deemed her quite ready for that.

She knew she was attractive, and as such, needed to keep her bright green eyes open for any trouble on her way home. At eighteen, she cut a lovely figure, and her mid-back-length brown hair had at least three inch-wide stripes of white through it.

Then…

"What's an elegant lady like yourself doing out all by her lonesome?"

She rolled her eyes in the direction of the voice, very pointedly _not_ actually looking at him, letting her mind work off her peripheral to see a shadowy-cloaked man. _Who's that, a throwback from the Nitsupar incident?_ Ignoring him, she continued walking.

"Hey, that's not nice."

Her shielding dropped just a tad, just enough to let herself be aware of what he was doing. And then a chill went down her spine.

She couldn't sense him. At all. Either his shields were better even than her teacher's, or…

She never finished that 'or.' She broke into a run instead, kinetically directing her hair so that it was incongruously blowing ahead of her instead of trailing behind like a banner begging to be grabbed.

He didn't grab her hair. He grabbed the back of her shirt. "You're a tricky one, aren't you? You'll be perfect for my plans."

She struggled to get away, and then she decided to just lash out with her powers.

However, the first explosion of mental energy she let out didn't release her shirt! It was like he just ignored it!

Struggling to get loose, suddenly she felt a second energy wave building inside her. _Huh? I thought I gave that one everything I had? Where's this second wind coming from?_

When it exploded into being, she lost consciousness.

When she awoke again, she was face down and her surroundings, though incredibly clear-cut, weren't familiar at all. Then she realized she was _in the air – way too high!_

She tried to catch herself with her mind as she started falling. Her weight was well within her kinetic range…but nothing happened!

She knew she screamed. She knew she started thrashing as she continued trying to use her telekinesis. She was moving forward somehow, but always down. Then she went past a strange metal post, and she _thought_ it was a complete miss, but suddenly a sharp pain lanced through her and she went into a spin as she blacked out again.

* * *

"Blah blah blah."

She woke up to strange voices saying words she didn't understand. She was face-down, again, but this time she was on a table and everything was holding still.

"Yada yada, yadayada yada yada."

 _Was that someone different? How many people are in here?_ Still…apparently she'd made it to Earth somehow. Which was strange, because she hadn't even covered teleportation in any of her classes; it wasn't supposed to be something she could do.

"Blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah."

 _Well, the first thing to do is to tune into their heads and pick up their language._ Her eyes hadn't really been open to begin with, but she let them close again as she entered the meditative stance she'd need.

"Yada yada, yada yada yada, yadayada."

… _Wait._ Why isn't this working _?! I can't even sense how many people are in the room!_

She started trying to move. Forget _move,_ she started trying to thrash! There was a weight on her back preventing easy movement, but now she was determined to get off this table and out of here!

"AAAH! Oyoy, oyada!"

"Blah-blah, blah blah!" She felt hands catching hold of her, trying to hold her still.

She got her hands flat on the table and gave herself a good shove, managing to push herself up, though that took some extreme effort. Then suddenly…

"Rrr, blah blah blah blah!" And a hand suddenly cracked across her cheek.

Her eyes snapped open and took in defined lines, bright colors, _way_ too bright lights…

"Aah!" she flung herself backwards, straightening her legs and snapping her hands up to cover her eyes. She stumbled, stepped on something sort of rounded (which could almost have been a cat, except for some reason it hurt _her_ ), and started toppling backwards…

Straight into someone's arms, who grabbed her around the chest in a tight – though strangely awkward – hug. "Yadayada, yah."

"Blah blah blah blah, blah?"

"Oy. Oy!" A hand caught her wrist and shook lightly. "Ayoyah?"

She sighed, and let the owner of the hand lower her wrists. Even through her eyelids, she could see that apparently someone had turned the lights down.

"Oy oy?"

 _He must want me to open my eyes._ _Well, since I don't speak his language…_ She slowly, carefully, opened her eyes again.

And stared straight into the gray-brown eyes of a rather punk-like boy right in front of her face.

Suddenly, his thoughts and memories poured through her, completely overwhelming her, and she closed her eyes again and struggled to gain her feet under the onslaught. _Whaaaaa…_

The arms of the boy holding her – _Yusei_ – tightened. "Easy, easy, you're fine. We're not going to hurt you."

The boy in front of her – _Crow_ , and what kind of a name was that? – scoffed. "Too bad nobody said that _before_ Jack hit her."

"She wouldn't stop fighting, you asked for help, what was I supposed to do?" The third voice, who had to be Jack, retorted.

"Ow…do I ever have a headache." She struggled to set her hands to her temples, trying to will the headache away.

"Because of the light?"

"Probably, Crow."

There was silence. Then Yusei spoke again. "Um…nobody had said his name. How'd you know it?"

"It was in his head when I made eye contact."

"Wait," Crow sounded a bit panicked. "You can read minds by staring into someone's eyes? I mean, your eyes are already beautiful and unnerving, but…"

She carefully opened one eye and looked at him where he'd danced back to. "I've never heard my eyes described that way. And I should be able to read minds without making eye contact." She took the time to size him up.

He had strange yellow marks on his face, including one on his forehead that looked like an M – remnants of his days as a criminal outcast – and his red hair was standing on end. His clothes were nothing like what she was used to.

Just beyond him was Jack. Blond hair, white jacket, a very stern face, and she deliberately avoided looking at his eyes.

She sighed. "So how'd I get here?"

Jack was the one to answer. "Considering you don't even look like you're from Earth, could you be more specific?"

"Answer what you want. How'd I get to Earth when I wasn't even trying to come, I don't think any of you know. Where I am specifically and how I got here, that's a simple enough thing to answer."

"Yusei's pad, technically," Crow waved a hand. "As for how you got here, well…Yusei brought you. You were unconscious, and we had to fix your busted wing."

She stared at him, straight at his eyes. And with that connection, she saw herself as he'd seen her, as he was seeing her now.

A teenage girl with torn brown clothing, gripped tightly about the chest by a boy she could only barely see with yellow-striped black hair and a blue jacket - or at least long blue sleeves, and Crow's memory filled in the rest - with intense golden eyes, shock-white hair and white wings just peeking from behind her right shoulder and hanging down outright on her left. As his gaze moved down a bit, she saw that her feet had changed into some wicked-looking claws, still with five toes pointing forward but now long enough to grab stuff to some extent. And what she'd stepped on that had caused her to lose her balance, what she was still gripping in her left foot, was a long tail with a bulb of long feathers at the end.

Her eyes fell shut as she let out a moan, all of her energy just draining out of her.

"Whoa, whoa, hey, get your feet under you!" Yusei spoke from behind her head as his arms frantically tried to keep a hold of her. "Crow, help me!"

Crow dashed over and caught her arms. "Come on, on your feet…" he lightly tapped her left foot with his right boot, somehow managing to trigger it letting go of her tail, and then kicked her tail out from under her foot.

Once Crow had a hold of her and her feet were firmly planted on the floor, Yusei let go. "I'm going to take a wild guess here and say you didn't originally look like that?"

"Bingo."

"So what's your name, anyway?" Jack asked.

"…Angelique."

"That's a pretty name," Crow answered, "but, ah, do you mind if we call you 'Angel'? You kind of look like one now, so at least it'd fit…"

She blinked at him. And once again, made eye contact.

 _In his imagination, she had a shining aura about her in many colors. Even her clothing had changed to a flowing gown._

"A _fallen_ angel, Crow." She shoved her right elbow backwards and winced as the impact caused pain in her wing.

"Still an angel! Speaking of that, though, do you think you can manage to get your left wing closed? It'd kind of be in the way if it were hanging open around here."

Angel – oh, thinking of herself by that nickname was actually kind of fun – turned to her left and studied how her wing was flopped open. Glaring at it, she tried to think it into moving.

Jack scoffed. "What, you can't get your own wing closed?"

"Of course not, Jack. My brain hadn't initially been wired for wings or a tail." After a minute of glaring, she got it to twitch. Latching onto the trigger for that with both figurative hands, she got another twitch, and then lifted her wing up. Once it was fully spread, she studied it.

A long bird-wing with white feathers. Nothing too special, except it was tapered such as to allow for speed. Cocking her head, she told it mentally, _close._

After a moment of quivering, it folded.

"Okay, that's good." She bent slowly and picked up the tail, draping it over her arm. "I'm not going to consciously try to move this until keeping the wing closed is second-nature."

Yusei walked around in front of her. "That's probably a good idea. You got a shock to your systems, and trying to do too much at once will probably cause problems."

She looked up at him and accidentally locked eyes. And what she saw amazed her.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

* * *

 _Everything was in first-person, because it was a memory._

 _Yusei was driving a vehicle – a D-Wheel, Crow's knowledge filled in and she vaguely recalled spotting the red vehicle in the room – along a street at night, with light coming from lamp posts (again, Crow's knowledge of the world that she'd pulled intruded to be sure she knew what things were)._

 _Suddenly, a girl's shriek reached his ears – did she really sound like that, her consciousness absently wondered – and his eyes wrenched upwards to the sky._

 _And there was that picture of her that she'd seen in Crow's eyes, plunging towards the ground and flailing in an attempt to stop or slow herself. And then she saw what had made her black out: her right wing hit that lamp post she'd thought she'd missed entirely, sending her into an uncontrolled spin!_

 _Yusei's thoughts rang out to the present Angel's mind._ _ **"If she hits the ground, she could end up even more hurt than she already is!"**_ _He revved his engine, drove towards her, and then switched into neutral gear._

 _Her spiraling fall took her right into his lap across the front of the D-Wheel, her left wing folding as it smacked into his chest, and he gunned the engine again into a tailspin in the same direction she'd been spinning, spiraling around until all the momentum was gone and he could stop again, facing back the way he'd come with her broken right wing spread out before the front wheel. Upon registering how thin her bones felt, he was a little surprised that the sudden collision with him hadn't broken her other wing; apparently her bones were stronger than they seemed._

" _Where did you come from? Well, I'd better get you to my place. At least it's close enough that I can get there before sunrise with how slow I'll have to drive." He revved his engine, and then started driving very slowly for home, the feathers of her right wing fluttering dangerously close to his front wheel and her tail dragging on the ground to his right._

Angel shook her head around, and then stared at the mark on Yusei's face, deeming that safer to stare at than his eyes. "You caught me while you were driving, when you didn't even know how fast I was falling relative to your speed!"

His eyebrows shot up. "Well, I couldn't just let you hit the ground! I'd never have heard the end of it!"

"Ah…" she let her gaze drop to his chest for a second. Then she held out her hand. "Thank you."

Yusei took hold of her hand. "You're welcome."

"So now that we've gotten that out of the way," Jack interrupted, "what shall we be doing with you now?"

Angel rolled her eyes. "I don't want…to be seen like this by a whole ton of people at the moment. But…I don't have anywhere to stay."

Crow grinned. "Hey, you could stay here if you want! I'm fine with it!"

Yusei nodded as well. "I don't mind either. Maybe we can help you find answers to why you've suddenly come here in a different form than you're used to."

Angel blinked at Yusei, trying to avoid locking eyes with him again. "But…I don't have any way to pay rent…"

Suddenly, inside her head, she heard a quiet voice. _Let me worry about that._

Almost at exactly the same time, Yusei answered, "Don't worry about that too much. We had a mechanic stay with us who'd had amnesia, and he used his time to modify our D-Wheels…Angel, are you okay?"

Angel looked up from her attempt to chase down that soft voice in her head, confused. And she accidentally looked at his eyes.

At least it gave her the reason Yusei had asked, because once again she was looking at herself through his eyes. _Her heel was tapping on the floor really quickly, almost like a nervous tic._

Angel looked down and tried to still the jittering leg. "I'm not trying to do that, really. I…I…" she closed her eyes and tried to analyze what was going on with her body.

Then she heard Crow clear his throat and opened her eyes again.

He was holding up a cable in front of her face. "I know this is technically for reading a D-Wheel's engine strength, not a human's heart rate, but…"

Angel stared at the cable for a second. Then she took it and set the bare metal end against her skin, just barely letting it slip under her shirt to press at a spot over her heart and pinning it there with her other hand.

Yusei walked over to a computer and tapped a couple of keys. The result on the screen was very bright to her sensitive eyes, but she made out from the glowing blue a glowing white line that was moving straight…except every now and again, it pulsed.

And that "every now and again" was in a steady rhythm. A fast rhythm, maybe four pulses a second.

Yusei's voice reached her ears. "Are you actually at rest right now?"

"Um…yes…?" she pulled the cable's end back out of her shirt.

"I'm not a medical student, but I think your heart rate is twice what it used to be."

"Oh."

Crow grinned at her. "Hey, I wonder how fast you are now…"

Angel glanced down at her feet. "I don't know. I do know that with my heart rate up, I'll have to try harder to get a decent workout, especially since I don't want to be seen right now."

Suddenly, the door slammed open and a high-pitched voice shouted, "Yusei!"

Angel screamed. She dropped the cable and her tail, partly spread her left wing and dashed almost straight into the back wall before spinning around to see the owner of the voice.

Two children were standing there. One had a single pigtail and was dressed in blue, while the other had two pigtails and was dressed in pink. Angel accidentally made eye contact with the blue-dressed child, and learned a few things. First of all, he had been the one to shout. Second, his name was Rua while his twin sister's name was Ruka. Third, all he was able to officially think at that moment was "WHAT IN THE WORLD WAS THAT?!"

Then Crow cleared his throat. "Well, I think we just got our answer to how fast you are."

Yusei also decided to pretend that nothing was out of the ordinary. "Yeah, I'd say from the scream to hitting the wall only took about a quarter of a second. Did you get their names?"

Angel nodded, setting a hand on her chest and trying to calm her heart down. Then she remembered that in her new condition calming her heart down was a losing battle, and lowered her hand again.

"Rua, Ruka, this is Angel. She's…new in town."

Rua finally got his mouth to work again. "Wow! You look amazing!"

Ruka waved a little. "You're…you're pretty."

Angel closed her left wing again. "Thank you," she answered, obliquely noting that she had her tail in a curve without thinking about it. Apparently all she'd needed to get her wing and tail controls properly hard-wired into her brain was a decent scare.

Rua walked slowly over, holding out a hand. "Um…can I touch your, um…"

Another glance at his eyes told Angel that he couldn't figure out if he wanted to touch her wing or her tail. She sighed. "Are your hands clean?" She may not particularly _like_ her new appendages, but she knew that feathers needed to be just so or they were just a big frustration to deal with.

Rua pulled his hand back and studied it more carefully. "…Yeah."

"Then you can touch my tail." A careful thought had her tail slowly waving towards him. "I'll think about if my wings are off-limits or not."

Rua took up the invitation quickly, grabbing hold of her tail right below that large long-feathered bulb.

And that caused a very interesting trigger.

As soon as Rua squeezed at the base of the bulb, the long feathers shifted and tilted back to hide their base and Rua's hand, and revealed what had been hidden in their midst: a six-inch-long bulb of glistening flesh with inch-tall blunt spikes lined up in rows on it and a single opening in the top.

"Ooh! That's…um…"

Angel suspected that he was trying to avoid saying "weird," because she was thinking it looked weird herself. It was like a flesh-colored barrel cactus or something. "I didn't know that existed."

Rua lifted his other hand up. "Why doesn't this have any feathers on-" he touched the bulb. "Ehh!" Twitching away and dropping her tail – which caused the feathers to fold up again – he stared at his hand. "That…feels…ehh…"

"Now you've got me curious." Angel lifted her tail to her hand and gripped at the same place as Rua wiped his hand off on his pants. When she set a finger between the rows of blunt spikes, she found out why Rua had reacted the way he did: the reason for the gleaming was that it was slimy. "Huh. Is this some type of oil?" She rubbed at the slick spot on her finger. Then a smile played onto her face. "Oh, you've got to be kidding me…this transformation came with a feather-care unit?"

"That's for your feathers?"

Angel realized that the kids probably didn't know much about birds. "Yeah. Birds always have to preen their feathers to make sure they stay in perfect condition – otherwise they can't even fly. See," she waved the bulb, "it's got a wide-tooth brush that I can comb through my feathers to straighten them, and the oil is to waterproof them. It won't do much for dirt or mud, though, so I'd have to use this thing after I've used a normal brush."

Then she noticed that Jack was yawning. _Boring, am I?_ Fixing a large smile on her face, she spoke again in a falsely sweet voice. "Why yes, it will be very difficult to brush the backs of my wings until I've had some more practice. Thank you, Jack, for offering to help me with that!"

His double-take was hysterical.

After laughing a bit, Angel took pity on him. "Don't worry, you wouldn't have to _do_ anything. You'd just be directing me for where I should start a brush stroke." She walked past him. Then she extended three odd claw-like prongs from within her tail-brush, picked up a ramen cup, and plunked it into Jack's hands.

It took her another two steps before she realized what she'd done, and swiveled her tail up and around to stare at the end of her brush. "A…wow. Okay, I was wondering how I'd manage to use a normal brush when my telekinesis isn't working." She thought about what she'd tried to trigger, and managed to get the prongs to extend again from an opening at the end of her oil-brush. "I really need to do some introspection at some point to figure out what my spirit monster actually is."

* * *

 **A/N: This chapter is…kind of anatomical-detail-heavy, I know, but honestly this was the best place to put in all the detail about her tail tip. The next chapter, hopefully, will go a bit faster. (It'd better – this is 5Ds, where speed is essential!)**


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

* * *

A couple of days later, when Angel's bruises from hitting Yusei's D-Wheel had faded, Crow slung a blanket over her wings and drove her out to a racetrack. "This is used for tournaments," he told her, "but there isn't anything going on right now. You're probably going stir-crazy back at the apartment, so let's get some of that out of your system at a place where nobody will see you."

"Okay." Angel shed the blanket by the simple method of spreading her left wing and then quickly closing it again. Then she stepped out onto the track.

The asphalt was warm under her bare feet. Flexing her talons against it as she stretched, she noted how it felt and considered how hard she could push her feet when she didn't have protection.

 _I…think my spirit monster toughened up my feet to ensure that I wouldn't need shoes, no matter how fast I somehow managed to run._ Angel turned and blinked at Crow. "Do you have a suggestion as to which way I should run? Clearly my wings would have a great deal to do with my steering, and my right wing's out of commission…"

"Um…" Crow went silent as, Angel presumed, he pictured each direction she'd have to lean and how her wing would probably react to the turns. "…Try running clockwise. Your wing will spread upwards, and probably all you'd have to do to get back on an even keel is flap it a couple times."

"Got it." And she turned around and took off running.

The wind in her face caused clear eyelids to close so that she could still see. But just the fact that she'd needed those to close said worlds about how fast she was running. The feel of the wind rushing through her hair and the feathers of her partly-spread left wing…it was just exhilarating.

After she circled the track once or twice, she heard the engine of Crow's D-Wheel. Then she noticed out of her peripheral that he was chasing after her.

Then he pulled up alongside her on her right. "Want to race?"

Well…she hadn't been going at full speed yet… She grinned at him and pushed herself into a higher gear.

And that was when she discovered that she could hold her own in a race against an engine-powered vehicle.

Crow pumped it up enough to pull next to her again and called to her, "If this was a Turbo Duel, you could collect speed counters without a D-Wheel!"

Angel leaped upwards and grabbed the wings of Crow's ride with her feet. "What are you talking about? Sure, I know the basics of dueling thanks to when I made eye contact with both you and Yusei, but I don't even have a deck!"

Crow looked up at her while she held herself poised above him. "Well, we ought to get you a deck at some point. It's almost a rule that everybody here have one and be able to duel." He pulled to a stop where they'd left Angel's blanket, carefully so as not to accidentally throw her.

"I don't know about that…"

"Hey, I think you'd be a natural!"

Angel caved with a smile. "Okay, okay. I might as well." Picking up the blanket, she slung it over her wings again, curling her tail up underneath it. "And as long as we're doing that, we might as well at least attempt to match the cards to whatever my spirit monster is. Someday I'll need to materialize it, and there's no reason not to do so into a card form."

"All right! Let's…" he hesitated, studying her again. "You…still don't want to be seen, right?"

"Right." _For now, anyway._

"Okay, I'll…try to buy you some cards that'll match you. You want to run home while I do that?"

"Uhm…sure. I remember the way."

He saluted her with a touch to his helmet and then drove off. Angel stood for a bit by herself. Then she turned and started running.

* * *

And promptly got turned around. She'd missed the part where highway turns weren't necessarily in the same place to go back the other way.

"Oh, great." Angel sighed and dropped into a crouch under her blanket. "Now where am I?" Then she looked up towards the top of the highway track. "…I wonder if I can see their pad from up there?" Crouching, she leaped up and caught the rail with her feet. Holding the blanket about herself like a cape and letting her tail droop around her feet, she turned slowly and looked about. "Where…where…there! There it is! I passed it!" She leaped down to the street heading the other way…

…And nearly collided with a car.

The loud honk startled her into dropping the blanket, and she took off running away from it as fast as possible, her left wing flaring as she went. "This world is dangerous!"

Dodging cars, she looked frantically for the exit. "How will I know which exit is Yusei's anyway?"

Then she realized she was being followed. Glancing behind her, she saw a motorcycle – or maybe a D-Wheel, she wasn't sure – staying hot on her tail. _Is he just going in my direction, or…_

Not letting that thought finish, she leaned and dashed onto an exit. And she sensed that the motorcycle exited right behind her.

Then she rounded several corners, still trying to lose him. Nothing was working.

Finally, she gave up, ran straight up a lamp post and sat down on top, twining her tail around the post for extra stability. She noted absently that her feet were hot and steaming. _So I do have an upper limit after all._ Once high, she looked around once again. _Where…_

The motorcycle stopped below. "You can't stay up there forever!" a male voice bellowed.

"Watch me."

"I'm serious! You'll need to eat soon, won't you?"

"I hate being Followed With Intent. If you'd really wanted a friendly conversation, then you should have waved or something when I looked over my shoulder. Go away, I'm not a duelist and I'm not in a good mood."

The stranger below went quiet. Angel wondered what he was thinking. Then, as she glanced down, he turned to look up at her.

And that was when she discovered that while she could see his eyes, she couldn't really catch his thoughts through the visor. Though…the tenor of his thoughts was worrying, seeing as they mostly seemed to center around "how do I get her to get down here?"

She waved her feet, trying to speed up the cooling process.

"I'm…sorry I scared you?"

 _You should have started with that if you wanted me to buy it._ Angel pulled her feet underneath her and stood up on the end of the lamp post, unwinding her tail.

"Hey, you really do need to get some calories after running as long as you have. You sure you don't want to come down? I could pay for your lunch…"

"I'm not hungry right now, thank you." She was just glad that he was too far down to hear her stomach growl. Her eyes measured the distance from her feet to the next lamp post. _Is that close enough?..._

"Come on, how am I supposed to convince you of my sincerity here?"

Angel didn't even bother to answer that. She just leaped.

She spent the next few minutes running across lamp posts with him chasing her on the street. She was starting to suspect that whoever else this guy was, he was probably working for the guy who'd attempted to capture her back in Chaotia.

Then she spotted a car waiting at a stoplight with the rear windows open, and didn't even hesitate beyond noting that the driver – a woman with long black hair and round glasses – looked like someone who could probably be intimidated into helping her out.

"Wha – "

"Turn right. Just…turn right." She dragged her tail into the confines of the car. It wasn't nearly as roomy in there as she could have hoped.

"Uh, okay!"

Listening carefully, she suspected that her pursuer wasn't interested in giving up. "I don't know why that guy's chasing me when I didn't even do anything except nearly run into a couple of cars."

The woman adjusted her rearview mirror. "No lights, so that's not Ushio…you're probably right to be wary. Where do you want to go?"

"Back to Yusei's place, in the most roundabout way you can manage."

"… 'Back' to Yusei's place?"

"Yeah, I don't want that guy to learn that that's where I'm staying."

"Okay, hang on back there, I'm about to pull evasive maneuvers!"

* * *

The next few minutes were spent in silence, except for the woman muttering periodically about how persistent their chaser was. Then she looked into the rearview mirror again. "Can I get an interview when we stop?"

"Why would you want an interview?"

"I'm a journalist, and yours would be an interesting story!"

Angel turned her fierce gaze to the bulb of tail feathers resting next to her face. "…I guess since enough people saw me on the freeway and then running from the motorcycle-guy, I might as well give some information to the press. Just bear in mind, there will be some questions I can't answer. Not _won't, can't._ "

"And can I take pictures, too?"

She sighed. "If you want, but if you get any shots of me right _here,_ I'd rather they never made the public."

"Don't worry, I won't take a picture of you in my car; there's not enough room to get a good shot anyway. Speaking of, is that guy still following us?"

Angel pushed up onto her hands and turned to stare out the back window. Her laser-sharp vision swept the streets…and there was no sign of him. "No. I think we lost him."

"Okay, good. Now…" she pulled into a parking space and got out, looking around. "Which way to Yusei's from here…"

As long as they were stopped, Angel carefully manipulated her tail to unlock and open the door so that she could crawl backwards out of the car.

"By the way," the woman glanced over at her, "you do know those guys can take care of themselves, right?"

 _She knows Yusei well enough to know who else stays there? Excellent choice, me!_ "Yeah, but that doesn't mean I want to lead trouble back to their nest."

She nodded. "Makes sense." Then she double-taked and stared at Angel outright. "Wow, I…wow!"

Her glasses made it hard for Angel to judge what _exactly_ this woman was thinking…evidently having anything between her eyes and her target's made it trickier to read minds…but the gist was that she was impressed by Angel's appearance.

Angel sighed. "Well, here's as good a place as any for that interview." She climbed onto the roof of the car and sat down, her tail circling into her lap and dangling between her feet.

"Oh! Okay, um…" the woman leaned into the car, grabbed something – a notepad and pen – and straightened again.

"By the way, what's your name?"

"Oh, right! I'm Carly." She got herself set up to write. "So, um…what's _your_ name?"

"Angelique, no last name; Angel for short."

"That really suits you, Angelique! Um, may I call you Angel?"

"Sure; the guys do."

"Awesome! Okay, so, where'd you come from?"

Angel hesitated for a second. "Are you…aware of Chaotia?"

"Absolutely! Some people come from there to visit here, and they make no secret about the fact that they come from another dimension. They don't pop in and out of existence, to avoid making people nervous they say, but they're perfectly willing to show off their ability to move things without touching them. Can you do that?"

"I…used to. Back in Chaotia, I was a mid-range telekinetic, a Phase Three sending and receiving telepath – that's somebody who can communicate back and forth mind-to-mind over a distance of about a five-mile radius – and a…um, I had duel potential, though I hadn't taken the final…initiation into the dueling world. Since coming here, I've tried to use some of my skills, but my kinetic powers won't work _at all_ , and my telepathy's…um, erratic."

"Erratic? So, wait, can you read minds?"

Angel hesitated again. "On Chaotia, yes I could if the person wasn't suitably shielded. Here, that's part of the erratic feature. For sending, I tried to transmit my thoughts to Yusei once a couple days ago, and he didn't seem to 'hear' me even though I was only standing five feet away from him."

"Maybe he just chose to not react?"

Angel rolled her eyes with a half-smile. "He'd have reacted: I chose to try to send him an image of a naked woman."

Carly burst out coughing, her eyes huge behind her glasses. "Um…um…yeah, that should have gotten a reaction."

"As for reading minds…" She fixed her eyes on Carly's lenses. "The complete truth should be off the record, because I don't want people avoiding me. Got it?"

Carly shuddered. "Got it."

"The short version of my ability to read minds is…I can't anymore. The more extended version is I can't read minds anymore _unless…_ I make eye contact. Then I can see virtually everything in a person's head whether I want to or not."

Carly was quiet for a second as she processed that. Then she stared up. "Does that mean you've been reading _my_ mind this whole time?"

"Like I said, the only way I can avoid reading someone's mind right now is if I avoid eye contact, and I have made eye contact with you a couple times now. However, apparently if there's something between my eyes and those of my target, I don't see things clearly."

"So…you _can_ read my mind, but you can't see _everything_."

Angel reached over and lightly tapped the bridge of Carly's glasses. "Keep those glasses on. They're good for your privacy."

She giggled. "Okay."

"As for my dueling power, I haven't made any attempt at that. Any other questions?"

"Um, yeah! You didn't mention teleporting in your resume, so…how'd you get here?"

Angel went silent. "I don't know. One minute I'd been trying to get away from a…a masher, I guess, though one with an unusual skill-set that prevented me from reading him…and then the next, I was falling through the sky above New Domino City with all the birdy features you see now."

"You didn't originally look like that?"

She shook her head. "And I don't know how this happened, any more than I know how I got here."

Carly was quiet for a minute. Then she popped back into the car and came up with a camera. "Okay, so I'm going to get a few shots, and the best ones will go into the article. Smile!"

Angel sighed and plastered a smile on her face, hoping it didn't come across as too fake.

Carly snapped a couple of pictures, running back and forth to get different angles. "Okay, can you spread your wings? That'd be an awesome shot that'll prove that they're not fake."

 _Oh. I forgot to mention that, and she didn't run far enough to my right to see that…_ "Um…well…" she got down from the car, turned her back to Carly and spread her left wing.

Carly went completely silent, and it took a full thirty seconds before Angel heard the shutter click again. "Um, what happened?"

"I seem to recall mentioning that I was _falling_ into New Domino. I collided with a lamp post; broke my wing."

"Ouch. That doesn't look like a hospital splint…"

"Yusei actually pulled a reckless stunt to catch me while I was falling – I was unconscious at the time, I found out about that later – and the guys did their best to splint it themselves while I was still out."

"Nice guys." She tossed the camera back into the car. "Okay, so time to get you back to them. I'm sure they're frantic by now."

"Um, there was no return time for my getting back to their pad. I was out with Crow for some exercise, and he went to buy some cards for me. I'd told him I could get back by myself…" she felt her cheeks getting hot.

Carly smiled. "Don't worry, I won't tell him if you don't. So, you want to ride shotgun or…"

Angel glanced ruefully over her shoulder at her wings. "If I'm riding in the car, I have to ride in the back, in the same position. No choice."

Carly went quiet for a second. "…If?"

Angel glanced at her feet. "I think I've recovered. I could just run next to you, or behind you, and you could lead me there."

Carly grinned. "Now _that_ will need video! Just hang on, let me set up my camera!"

* * *

A few seconds later, Carly started driving again with her phone tied to the rearview mirror and recording behind her. Angel followed after her, waving her arms in hand signals for turns, until they got to Yusei's place.

"Hopefully my editor doesn't immediately write off everything I've taken notes on as being made up."

"If it looks like he's going to, invite me over. He can satisfy his own curiosity, decide that it's not a glorified costume, and move on."

"Great idea!" Carly wrote down an address, gave it to Angel, and then drove away.


End file.
